Stop Smoking Help

Like many products before it, the electronic cigarette seems to have become stronger since the health organisations urged caution, claiming not enough testing had been done to prove them safe. 

Whilst the organisations distanced themselves from the electronic cigarette, the sales have continued to grow and with the UK smoking ban now entering its second winter, the thought of standing outside the pub or office in the freezing temperatures seems to be enticing smokers to try something different.

Some pubs and bars are now even beginning to sell the electronic cigarette, realising they are becoming more popular, sensing a potential profit and that the punters are becoming more willing to try them, not simply as an alternative to a cigarette but as a genuine reason not to stand outside and freeze for a smoke.

During this time of credit crunch, many smokers who don’t actually want to quit smoking altogether but are looking for something more affordable are also turning to the electronic cigarette.

With a little shopping around, the prices for smoking the electronic cigarette are vastly less than their standard counterparts. One such electronic cigarette company provides a table to show the significance of the savings and it goes a little bit like this:

Approximate only

• Electronic Cigarette:10 a day for one year = £ 122

• Real Cigarettes : 10 a day for one year = £1004

That equals a savings of more than £800 per year.

• Electronic Cigarette:40 a day for one year = £ 487

• Real Cigarettes : 40 a day for one year = £3529

That is an incredible saving of more than £3000 per year.

With those figures in mind it is not difficult to see why the electronic cigarette is becoming a very attractive proposition.

There are apparently no carcinogens or toxins in an electronic cigarette, immediately making them a far healthier alternative. Nicotine and flavourings seem to be the only substances present in the device.

In summary, with none of the dangers of real cigarettes present, a massive cost reduction over real cigarettes and social benefits too, (no dangers of passive smoking and no restrictions under the smoking bans) the electronic cigarette still provides a nicotine flavour, revealing a very genuine alternative and potential aid for those who wish to quit smoking.

As the winter’s harsh realities sink in, at least there seems to be some hope on the horizon, not just for smokers but for their families and friends too. Perhaps if the electronic cigarette proves itself in the next few years we may be approaching a new era and a much less smoky, healthier one at that.

I own two packs of unopened, camel cigarettes that show snow on the pyramids and a christmas hat on the camel. Does anyone have any ideal what they would be worth?

I just don’t understand why big tobacco is putting so many harmfull chemicals in cigarettes. What is the logic behind that? I know the simple answer is to speed up addiction but I would like to know the real answer.

There is an exciting new invention that everyone who smokes should know about. It’s called the electronic cigarette, also known as a smokeless cigarette or e-cigarette, and it is changing the legal landscape for cigarette smokers around the world.

The patented Electronic Cigarette offers to effectively simulate the experience of smoking an actual cigarette, without any of the health or legal issues surrounding traditional cigarettes.

While Electronic cigarettes look, feel and taste much like traditional cigarettes, they function very differently. You see, electronic cigarettes do not actually burn any tobacco, but rather, when you inhale from an e-cigarette, you activate a a flow censor which releases a water vapor containing nicotine, propylene glycol, and a scent that simulates the flavor of tobacco. All of which simply means that electronic cigarettes allow you to get your nicotine fix while avoiding all of the cancer causing agents found in traditional cigarettes such as tar, glue, hundreds of additives, and hydrocarbons.

In addition to being healthier than traditional cigarettes, and perhaps most importantly of all, is the fact that electronic cigarettes are completely legal. Because Electronic cigarettes do not involve tobacco, you can legally smoke them anywhere that traditional cigarettes are prohibited such as bars, restaurants, the work place, even on airplanes. Furthermore, electronic cigarettes allow you to smoke with no fears of inflicting harm on others due to nasty second hand smoke.

The refillable cartridges come in a multitude of flavors as well as nicotine strengths. You can get regular, menthol, even apple and strawberry flavored cartridges and nicotine strengths come in full, medium, light, and none. While electronic cigarettes are technically a smoking alternative rather than a smoking cessation device, the range of nicotine strengths offers some obvious potential as an aid in the ones attempts to quit smoking and seems to be proving popular within that market.

The nice thing about electronic cigarettes as apposed to say, nicotine patches, is that e-cigarettes produce the same tactile sensation and oral fixation that smokers desire, while satisfying ones tobacco cravings as well. When you take a drag from n electronic cigarette you actually feel the your lungs fill with a warm tobacco flavored smoke and when you exhale the smoke billows out of your lungs just like regular smoking, however, as mentioned, that smoke is actually a much healthier water vapor that quickly evaporates and therefore does not offend anyone in the immediate vicinity.

While electronic cigarettes have been around for a while in various incarnations, it has been recent advances in the technology as well as ever increasing restrictions against smoking that have propelled the e-cigarette into a new found popularity. If you are interested in a healthier alternative to smoking, or if you simply want to have the freedom to smoke wherever and whenever you want, an electronic cigarette might be the solution you’ve been looking for.

He used to be the hard core smoker type, and then he quit since I have known him. Every once in a while when he’s really stressed out or pissed off or just feels like it he’ll have a cigarette (his roommates and all their friends also smoke). I am SUPER anti-smoking, and he knows it. Even when he doesn’t tell me, I can smell it on him when he’s been smoking and I call him on it. Doesn’t smoking just one or two cigarettes just make him want to smoke that much more? Should I even bother talking to him about it since he already knows it’s disappointing me? Advice, please.

Smoking is a vice, we all know that. The amazing thing is that even smokers know what a dangerous habit smoking it, taking a heavy toll on their health, relationships and finances. But still, they are will not - or perhaps they think they cannot - kick the smoking habit. However, there are stop smoking aids available today that can actually help the smoker to give up smoking and seriously increase the quality of his or her life. Experts suggest the following aids to stop smoking.

Self Determination and Support - Initially, a smoker may smoke because of the so-called thrill the habit provides, but as time passes on, smoking become a more or less mechanical activity. Hardened smokers do not find any pleasure in smoking; they smoke only because they cannot give up the habit. Hence, if you want to stop smoking, the first thing you must have is will power. Once you have that, half the battle is won.

Then tell everyone you know that you are quitting the habit. You will be surprised how well this works. If everyone knows you are trying to quit smoking, you will find it very difficult to smoke in public. You can also join the several support groups that discuss stop smoking aids at length. There is a lot of morale boosting here, which could go a long way in helping you to come off the smoking habit.

Medications and Therapies - If you are already a long way into smoking, then quitting the smoking habit will become much more difficult for you. Apart from your determination, you will also need to take treatment for the havoc nicotine has already caused in your body. Here, there are many herbal remedies that can help you. The benefit of the herbal remedies is that they will not only repair the damage done in your body, but they will also help to wean away your smoking addiction slowly but surely. In order to resist from smoking, doctors would sometimes prescribe antidepressants to smokers.

Nicotine Patches - One reason why most smokers are afraid to give up smoking is that they think they will not be able to resist the withdrawal symptoms that would come in. Withdrawal symptoms will occur if you have been smoking for too long, but if you are a mild smoker, then there will be no such problems.

Anyways, today there are nicotine patches for those who cannot give up smoking all at once. These nicotine patches reduce the temptation for a smoke, and help the person to quit smoking. However, many medical experts are against nicotine patches because they are, after all, nicotine products. Experts believe that patches are never able to reduce the urge of smoking, but they can only reduce the frequency.

Alternative Therapies - Today, alternative therapies have made a huge impact on the medical world, just because of their effectiveness at treatment without causing any side-effects. Smokers are using natural therapies like yoga and Ayurveda to a very high degree. Yoga helps the individual to exercise better control over the mind, while Ayurveda is an ancient herbal science that can work at the internal body system.

When both yoga and Ayurveda are practiced together, they can become two of the most formidable stop smoking aids. There are many western herbs like St. Johns Wort, which are currently being investigated for their properties in making people giving up smoking. Today, different forms of hypnosis are also being used in a significant way to help people stop smoking.

Thus, there are many stop smoking aids available and, frankly speaking, it is easier to quit smoking today than it ever was before. A right mix of determination, support and remedies could go a long way in converting a smoker to a nonsmoker.

Teens are unaware of the dangers of smoking because they see their elders happily puffing away. Peer pressure is another culprit that leads young people to smoke, but in some cases, smoking is an act of defiance or simply the result of curiosity. If you suspect your teen is into smoking and if your suspicion is correct, be concerned and educate your child on the dangers of smoking.

Smoking and It’s Threat to Life and Limb

Each year, millions of people die from smoking-related diseases. The figure is likely to increase yearly as more young people are taking up the deadly vice. The youngest smoker is a 7-year-old kid who earns his keep scrounging for recyclable scraps.

This scenario is in a third world country and is just the tip of an iceberg. Smoking is eating away young lives but earning governments billions of dollars in tax revenues. So the issue remains unresolved, similar to the early dire global warming predictions, which many choose to ignore.

Several cancers are results of years of smoking and young people are at a higher risk because of their early and prolonged exposure to the poison. But quitting smoking is just as difficult as quitting heroin. Support groups are available to help people get out of the rat hole and start living healthier lives. But it is easier said than done. Smoking is not illegal and minors caught smoking are not penalized. Therefore, the vicious cycle continues. If you are parent with teens who smoke, you should be concerned and take immediate action to help your teens quit the addictive habit.

Helping Teens Quit Smoking

A distraught mom reported that her son and daughter were caught smoking in their rooms. The telltale odor of cigarette smoke gave away the secret. Empty cigarette packs and cigarette butts were uncovered in the trash bin. Alarmed, she reported the incident to her husband, also a non-smoker and together they educated their children on the dangers of smoking, enlisting them in a rehabilitation and support program to help wean their children from smoking.

If you can’t catch your children smoking at home, try to find out who they hang out with and where they spend time after school. Somehow, someone will be able to tell you if your teen’s friends are into smoking for the fun of it.

Telling your son or daughter not to go with their smoking friends will not yield any promising result. Instead, invite their friends over and show them YouTube videos on the irreversible effects of smoking on the body. Give them books on the effect of smoking or invite a doctor to your children’s school or to a homeowners’ association meeting to discuss the perils of smoking. Organize parents and ask the school’s administration and faculty to wage war on smoking. There shouldn’t be smoking and non-smoking areas in schools. Instead, smoking should be banned outright. Amid protests, you can always make it clear that sometimes parents and teachers have to be cruel in order to be kind. Smoking is deadly and there is no other euphemism for it.

Be unswerving in your efforts to wage war against teen smoking. Smoking teens will be smoking adults and will suffer the consequences in the future. Instead of waiting for disaster to strike, start the campaign now. If you love your teens, put your foot down. They’ll thank you for your sustained efforts to help them get rid of a deadly and costly habit.

There are two mental states that must be contented before a smoker will voluntarily quit smoking. These essentials are called “Desire,” and “Decision.”

DESIRE: A want, crave or a wish for

DECISION: Making up of one’s mind / a verdict or judgment

In order to quit smoking, you have to DESIRE to quit. You probably want to quit smoking, at least some part of you does, or you wouldn’t be reading this article.

In addition, in order to quit smoking, you have to DECIDE to give up the smoking addiction. Since you haven’t quit smoking, it simply means that you have not DECIDED to quit smoking yet.

So what you need is to feel a strong motivation to make a “DECISION” to quit smoking.

MOTIVATION, we all want it. The source of each of our motivations is a belief. Think about it, if you didn’t have a belief that you would be hurt if you jumped from a tall building, then you would not feel motivated to be alert. If you did not believe that the gnawing sensation in your stomach meant that you were hungry, you would not feel motivated to eat.

When it comes to giving up the cigarette addiction, people who smoke need to feel a lot of motivation to make the DECISION to quit. Motivation is based on the ideas that we believe. So you will need to figure out exactly what ideas would motivate you if you believed them. Because when you feel powerfully motivated, you will quit smoking.

Thanks to NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) and hypnosis for motivation, it’s much easier to learn how to believe these new ideas than you think it is. However, you don’t believe the ideas that will motivate you to quit smoking at this point, or you would have already quit smoking cigarettes.

For the purpose of this discussion, we need to define a few words.

DOUBT: Uncertain/distrustful/dubious - “maybe it’s this way, and maybe it is not.”

BELIEF: Trust/faith/tenet - A state of mind devoid of all doubt. In other words, belief means, “this is the way that it is.”

HIGHLY VALUED CRITERIA: What is most important to you, as an individual human being.

When you believe that if you continue to smoke your highly valued criterion is jeopardized, you will feel the motivation that you require to break your smoking addiction. We call this a negative motivator, because it’s a belief that motivates by giving you bad sensations. Negative motivators are great for getting you to make decisions and changes in your life.

When you believe that if you do quit smoking, your highly valued criteria will become enhanced, you will also feel the motivation that you require to quit smoking. This is a positive motivator, because it motivates you by promising good feelings if you quit smoking.

The first assignment is for you to figure out what the most essential aspects of your life are. Your most highly valued criteria are usually intangibles. For example: Money would not be highly valued criteria, but the freedom, fun, or security that money can purchase would be. Write your list of highly valued criteria down on a piece of paper.

Next you need to DECIDE what you would need to believe to feel motivated to break the habit. Here is the good news, sort of: Logic has nothing to do with belief. Things don’t have to be logical for a person to believe them. As a matter of fact, they rarely are. So do not worry about logic!

The format for your negative motivator beliefs will be: “I believe that if I continue to smoke, something horrible will happen to my most highly valued criteria.”

Make sure that you frame your motivators in the positive. In other words, always state what you want or what will happen. Never state what will not happen. Eliminate the “not” word from the beliefs.

In this example we will say that your children’s welfare is your most highly valued criteria.

WRONG: “I believe that if I continue to smoke, I won’t be doing my kid’s health any good.”

CORRECT: “I believe that if I continue to smoke, my secondhand smoke will make my children sick.”

Next, create a list of positive motivators. “I believe that if I quit smoking: (something very important will be enhanced).”

WRONG: “I believe that if I stop smoking, I won’t make my kids sick.”

CORRECT: “I believe that if I quit smoking, my kids will be safe because I will eliminate their exposure to the dangers of my secondhand smoke.”

The next step is to change the computer codes in your brain to make yourself actually believe these motivational ideas. Now for a bombshell: Your beliefs have nothing to do with what is real. Instead, your beliefs have everything to do with your perception of reality. In other words, it has a lot to do with the way that you see things.

Our belief systems are located in our subconscious. The subconscious mind is like a computer. Computers do not reason. The input to a computer controls the output from a computer. To demonstrate, I want you to think of something that you already believe without the slightest bit of doubt. Make it a belief that makes you feel good.

For instance, it’s easy for most people to believe that they love their kids. If that is true for you, make a mental image that lets you experience that feeling of love.

I’m going to ask some questions, and there are not any correct or incorrect answers.

Is your mental image a moving picture, or a still?

Is it in color, or in black and white?

Is it close or far?

Is it focused or fuzzy?

Is it normally bright, overly bright, or dim?

Is there a border on it?

Is it borderless?

Is it a panorama?

It does not matter what your answers are write them down. These are the computer codes that your subconscious uses to make you feel your feelings of belief. In this case they are the mental codes for positive belief, because you have chosen a belief that gives you a positive feeling. You have just calibrated your positive belief.

All positive belief pictures are bright and focused. If yours are not, then you probably do not really have total belief. An element of doubt is probably present. So find another belief to calibrate.

If you think of something that you doubt, and you make a mental image of it, one or more of these computer codes will probably be different. Similarly, if you have a belief that gives you a negative feeling, (a negative belief): one or more of those codes will be different.

In NLP we call these particular computer codes visual submodalities.

Now you will need to calibrate a negative belief. So repeat the same exact process, but do so using an idea that you already believe, that makes you feel ghastly.

Once you have calibrated both your positive and your negative beliefs, it’s a simple issue to manipulate what you believe so you can motivate yourself to DECIDE to quit smoking.

So, to summarize, using the above example: “I believe that if I continue to smoke, my secondhand smoke will ruin my kid’s health.”

1. Become aware of how motivated you feel to quit smoking.

2. Make a mental image that illustrates the above belief.

3. Adjust the computer codes (visual submodalities) of the image so that they match the codes from your calibrated negative belief image.

4. If you are right handed, move your eyeballs (and your mental picture) up to your left and hold it there for five seconds. If you are left handed, go up to the right. This will help you to quickly memorize the belief.

5. Now sense how well motivated you feel to quit smoking. Do you feel more motivated? Do you feel less motivated? Or are your feelings the same?

By utilizing this system you can make yourself believe almost anything by making an image in your mind that illustrates your new idea and then adjusting your mental image to make it match your calibrated belief pictures.

And if you have a belief that is holding you back, you can use the same technique to change that belief to doubt by changing one or two of the submodalities and memorizing it that way.

Now that you can motivate yourself to DECIDE to quit, you will quit smoking. A DECISION to quit means: I’m quitting no matter what it takes. If you are similar to most, you will not want quitting to feel painful. The good news is that you will not have to suffer. Because there are several hypnotic and NLP methods that can greatly reduce, or even completely eliminate the discomforts of withdrawal from the cigarette smoking addiction.

Hi guys…I want to help my boyfriend stop smoking but I have no idea where to start…Is there something that he can do? A patch that he could try? Which one will give him some results?

I think I might be pregnant and I know I should quit until I find out and I was just wondering if smoking does harm or gives defects to your baby during really early pregnancy. Stories? Advice?